UNA AND THE LION.
John Haviland was a banker down-town, a man of much business and of few
intimate friends. He was over thirty at this time, and made no sign of
getting married; which was the stranger, as his health was good, his
wealth sufficient, and he cared less for the pleasures of life than for
its happiness. He had no brothers nor sisters; his mother was a widow
and he lived with her. Flossie said it was hard to get interested in
such people as John Haviland.
Every afternoon at four he left his office and went on a long and
solitary walk; thus his days were of a piece with his life. He never
chose the conventional promenades: and through the outlying districts,
the river villages, the Bowery, the forgotten little parks and green
places; by Riverside and Morningside; through the mysterious Greenwich
settlement, as well as Central Park, Morrisania, and Fort Washington;
in any sort of weather--sleet, snow, rain, or freeze--you might have
met the man, striding along like a well-oiled engine, observant of
everything, from the street urchins to the signs in the shop-windows.
This at an hour of day when he might have gone to teas; wherefore
people said he had never been in love. Which is a rash predication of
your chimney-sweeper, but happened to be true of Haviland.
One day his wandering took a direction beyond Washington Square. This
most characteristic of all New York squares lies bounded on the north
by Belgravia, on the west by Bohemia, on the east by Business, and on
the south by Crime. West of it are rich districts of individuality,
where the bedrock of shabby gentility develops occasional lodes
and pockets for the student of humanity. It is a place where the
deserving and the undeserving poor are huddled together, both of them
inefficient, but neither wicked; and where all the inhabitants make
some sort of incoherent struggle against the facts of life, and either,
on the one hand, emulate respectability, or, on the other, excuse
themselves with the divine license to vagabondage given by Art.
In one of the southernmost and more dubious of these streets, Haviland,
steaming along with his mind on everything and a watch on deck--for he
was no introspective Hamlet--noticed a group of hulking fellows ahead
of him. They were the sort of persons that have no obvious function
in the divine economy; persons whose principal end seems to be to get
knocked on the head with clubs in street riots, thereby dying, at
least, with some poetic justice. Haviland would not have ordinarily
noticed them; but he was struck by their unwonted rapidity of motion,
and looking, he saw that they were following something; that something
being a graceful female figure, dressed in black. John Haviland swung
promptly into line behind them; and gaining more rapidly upon them than
they upon the lady, he sauntered innocently between two of them when
she was still a few dozen yards in front of them. He glanced casually
at them as he passed; they slunk away like beaten dogs, and melted, in
divers directions, from sight.
In a moment more they had reached a broader street; and John was on the
point of diverging his course again from that of his protégée, when,
looking at her, he hesitated a second, and then walked rapidly up to
her.
“Miss Holyoke?” said he, raising his hat and with an unavoidable shade
of surprise in his tone.
“Mr. Haviland? you down here too? Or perhaps you come on the same
errand?” And Gracie smiled frankly, as John looked up, puzzled, into
her lovely face. “I am visiting some poor families, you know--for the
Combined Charities----”
“But surely,” he broke in, “you ought not to be down here alone, Miss
Holyoke?” They were at Sixth Avenue by this time; and Gracie was
looking for a car.
“Usually my aunt lets me have the carriage,” said Gracie; “but Miss
Livingstone needed it to-day. And I don’t like to drive quite up to the
doors, even then. It seems so hard to drive up with one’s own carriage
and horses, and then have to refuse them everything but a little work,”
she added, smiling. “And Miss Brevier often goes with me.”
“Do you mean that you come here often?” asked John; and she told him
that she and Miss Brevier had each “taken” the people on one street;
and were seeing that they got help when help was necessary, and that
the undeserving had none wasted upon them. John put her safely in the
car, and resumed his pedestrian voyage with something new to think
of. This personal visiting by refined young ladies was doubtless an
excellent thing on its poetic side; but it could not but seem to him
that the danger and the exposure were out of proportion to the benefit.
He had had much experience among the city poor, and was perhaps a
little skeptical as to the advantages to be gained by such devotion.
For, as is the way of things so often here below, the selfish, the
fraudulent, the undeserving, find it easy to advertise themselves and
solicit help; while the saddest cases of all are lost in some modest
garret; there they suffer unseen, ashamed to cry for charity, and
wear their lives out silently. Except this latter class, and cases of
long illness, most of the poor in New York are poor from laziness,
intemperance, or crime; and their moral attitude towards society is
rather that of sullen and callous defiance, or covetous acquiescence,
than repentance. We need to get a better breed of men, not coddle
the present one overmuch. Life suits them well enough as it is, if
they could only get a few of their neighbors’ goods; such goods as
they desire and Mrs. Flossie desired, and not the _summum bonum_. If
degraded, they do not mind their degradation, but are content with
it; money always, clothing and food sometimes, they will derisively
accept; but work they will evade and not perform. Amongst these,
thought Haviland, there may be much squalor, even much suffering; but
there is little real poverty. Had he told all this to Gracie she would
have said that it made no difference; and that one should try all the
more to find the true cases, where righteous-minded beings were sinking
in the turmoil of the world; and that one such family helped and saved
was worth a hundred of impostures. Moreover, Gracie had not a man’s
fear of being taken in; had she thought of it at all, she would have
scorned it; the odium of deception falls on the deceiver, not the
deceived; she would not stoop to be suspicious. And mercy will ever be
a mystery to mere justice: like the ways of God to human intellect.
Meantime Haviland was walking along, lost in thought. He wandered
mechanically through various unknown and afterward unremembered
districts, by a strange old graveyard yet undesecrated, through Leroy
Street, and Sixth Avenue, until his time was up; then he went home and
dined, with his mother. In the evening he had his ward club meeting;
this was a thing in which he took great interest, and he went as
a matter of course. It was not an easy thing, at this time, to be
admitted to the councils that rule in the free city of New York. And,
as we have spent some time over pretty Flossie Gower, that flower of
republican society, it may not be wasted time to see a little what
thing this political club was, which may stand, in a sense, for its
root.
If New England, with its offshoots on the Western Reserve and
elsewhere, is the result of an attempt to obtain religious freedom, our
whole country, in a still larger sense, is the result of an attempt
to obtain political liberty. Our national faith has been that which
is, of all possible faiths, the farthest from that of poor James
Starbuck; it is government by everyone, while nihilism is the negation
of any government at all; moreover it is individualism, as opposed
to socialism. But in New York there has grown to be a class who, as
others could give no time to government, sought to make up for it by
giving all of theirs. For what proportion is there between the time of
a busy merchant or physician, and that of a professional idler? And
the interminable and vain caucuses, impossible to the one, form the
delight of the other. These had leisure to make acquaintances; to know
each other; to pass their days in bar-rooms, nurseries of political
power; and long ere this, they had arrogated to themselves an effective
oligarchy. Theirs to make nominations and to mar candidates’ careers;
and the people, high-placed or low, had no right in their august
councils save on sufferance. Thus we dropped aristocracy, and got a
kakistocracy; but an oligarchy still.
John Haviland, however, had been admitted. He had had to struggle hard
for this honor; and had finally attained it much more by his physical
prowess than by his intellectual qualifications. Near his house were
the rooms of a well-known “professor in the art of self-defence;” and
there he had been in the habit of taking lessons, and occasionally
“putting on the gloves” with all comers. Among the frequenters of the
place were also many of the local magnates of the party; and Haviland,
whose manners were frank and hearty, had thus met most of his ward
leaders, and knocked the greater part of them down successively. Thus
treated, they took a fancy to him; said that there was no nonsense
about him; and one day, to Haviland’s great surprise, informed him that
he had been elected a member of their local club.
The meeting to-night was not over-interesting. It might have been
railed less incendiary, but it was certainly more selfish than Mr.
James Starbuck’s, we have so lately left; while for earnestness and
a definite attempt at effecting something, the two were not for one
moment to be compared. For whereas the official political organization
of the great national party in Haviland’s ward was occupied primarily
with satisfactory apportionments of the offices among the would-be
candidates, and secondarily with beating the rival party at the polls,
Starbuck’s people went in much more directly for measures than for men,
and as for offices, desired none at all.
Haviland found it hard to keep his attention, that evening, on the
subject before the meeting. Tom was saying what a good fellow was
William, and how the machinations of Richard might be defeated if
Patrick were only secured, which might be done if Michael were given
a local judgeship. It was pretty unsatisfactory talk at the best, and
hardly can have been what the makers of the Constitution, or even what
Monsieur Jean Jacques Rousseau, intended. Haviland had often stood up
against it, alone; but that night he gave little ear to it, and things
went their own way.
From this meeting he went to the Farnums’. He was a familiar in the
house, and could call late, if he chose. Mrs. Farnum had disappeared;
Mr. Farnum was rarely visible; but sitting in the front room alone,
with a sweeping robe of pale-gray velvet across the floor, and head and
arm leaning on a low chair, a book discarded lying face downward on
the floor, he found the beauty. A moment before he entered, her eyes
(purple-gray they were in color) had had a strange look, both proud
and longing, both weary and fierce. This was peculiar to them; but it
softened a shade as he entered, and she looked up at him.
“Mr. Haviland?” said she.
“Yes--I came to see you because----”
“Because you had nothing better to do,” said she, tersely.
“If you will,” said John, smiling. “Though it is not kind.”
“The world is not kind,” said the beauty, with a frown, looking off
again.
“For the world you are not responsible,” said Haviland gravely. “Tell
me, do you know Miss Holyoke?”
“Miss Holyoke? What Miss Holyoke?”
“Mrs. Richard Livingstone’s niece.”
“No,” said Kitty Farnum, curtly. “I don’t know Mrs. Livingstone.”
“But I thought you might have met Miss Holyoke. Do you not belong to
the Combined Charities?”
“Certainly not.”
“I wish you did,” said John, half to himself. “I thought you and Miss
Holyoke might--might find it pleasant to go together.”
“I have no interest in them,” said Miss Farnum, as if finally. And she
looked as if she thought the world too intolerable to herself to dream
of trying to mitigate it for others.
“Excuse me,” said Haviland; and the talk drifted off into commonplaces.
But Miss Farnum’s manners were not lenient, and his call was a short
one.
Haviland continued to take his afternoon walks; but he was now more
than ever apt to lose himself in the district west of Washington
Square. Gracie never came to any trouble, all that winter, on her
charitable excursions; but, if you had ever met her there alone, you
would have very likely met, just far enough behind her, so that she
never saw him, steaming along in his usual wholesome way, our friend
John Haviland.